Winding Down, Mopping Up

We have two weeks left in Málaga. For a week of it, we’ll have a rental car. Car rental rates here are incredibly low for some reason – perhaps the time of year. We’re paying $78 CDN all-in for seven days. It’s a puddle jumper of a car, but still a bargain. The downside? We’ll have to park in the garage under our building, which is only accessible by a vehicle lift. Our landlords warned us to rent a small car. We’ve seen others entering it, and it’s a tight fit.

There are lots of things to do outside the city and we haven’t done much, only Ronda and Marbella. There are a couple of nature reserves near us – one with nesting flamingos. There are a few towns well worth visiting: Antequera, Nerja, Jerez (a long drive, that one.) So we’ll be keeping busy. The weather looks as if it will be fabulous for most of the rest of our time here: low to mid-20s Celsius and sunny. It’s been a bit cool and rainy lately, but it’s brightening now.

On Friday, we didn’t get out until after lunch. We went for a walk down to the harbour and then over to the Museo de Málaga, the provincial art and archaeology museum. It’s housed in a gorgeously renovated late-18th/early-19th century customs house that sits close to where the port used to be. The museum opened in 2015. The Spanish have definitely perfected the art of renovating historic buildings for use as museums and galleries. This one is a gem.

Museo de Málaga courtyard

The designers and curators have done wonders, but they’ve essentially created a really good imitation of a silk purse from a sow’s ear of a collection. I liked the Open Storeroom on the ground floor, the beginning of the tour. It’s a room where all kinds of things – paintings and archaeological relics – are jumbled together on plain plywood shelves, mostly without labeling. You have the sense of being allowed into a real museum storeroom, which this is obviously not. I think it’s meant to give the impression - unfortunately false – that this is the stuff that wasn’t quite quite good enough for the main displays. Since some of it is pretty cool, the implication is there’s much better to come. There is better to come, just not much better.

Artifacts displayed in Open Storeroom

The art is mostly 17th and 18th century religious works looted from monasteries and convents during one of Spain’s anti-clerical periods in the 19th century – the curators refer to it as material “confiscated” – or work by 19th and early 20th century academic painters trained at the local art schools. While the Impressionists and their successors in Paris and Berlin were turning painting on its ear during this period, the Malagueno academics persisted in painting boringly realistic scenes in the muted tones of the old masters.  

Religious art looted from churches and monasteries

The collection is well curated and displayed, with excellent commentary on the history of the collection and the various local schools of painting. (Though to my eye, they’re still pretty much indistinguishable.) What the curators have failed to do, perhaps deliberately, so as not to diminish the importance of the paintings on view, is explain how they fit into the larger context of art in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They really don’t.

The artist's wife by Fernando Labrada Martín (1888-1977) - I liked this one

In fairness, there is a room of later 20th century Malagueno art, including, apparently, some Picasso, that we did not go into because we were museumed out by the time we got to it. The entry fee at the MdM is a paltry €1.50. So we might go back – that’s what we told ourselves – but I’m guessing we won’t.

It’s a similar story with the archaeology: brilliantly curated and displayed but, with few exceptions, second- or third-rate artifacts. The seated and standing Roman statues are mostly headless and smashed up. The heads and busts are noseless and chipped beyond recognition – sometimes, it’s true, to poignant effect. There are a couple of impressively ancient Greek battle helmets, some lovely Roman mosaics, and interesting displays about megalithic and neolithic burials and cave painting. The 700-year-long Moorish period in Málaga’s history is strangely under-represented.

Would I recommend this museum? Only to those who really like museums – which we do – and with the caution that you keep expectations low.

Saturday we did pretty much nothing: shopped in the morning, then walked around the old town and down to the harbour in the afternoon, where we sat in the sun and read our books. Well, I worked on a cryptic crossword, while Karen read. When it started to cool, we went home.

We have done this more than once because our apartment – and I might not have mentioned this before – is depressingly gloomy sometimes. It has windows only on air shafts, albeit large air shafts. Since it’s a four-storey building, not much light gets down here to the first (second) floor. We could take chairs up to the roof, where we go to dry our laundry, but we prefer to get out and go down by the water.

Sunday, free museum day, we went back down to the harbour to sit in the sun. We’ve found a spot with reasonably comfortable benches, well protected from the sometimes cool breezes off the water. It can get really hot, which has been quite welcome these last few cool days. But I had to move to the shade after a half hour or so. At about 4:30, we walked up to the Picasso Museum and queued for a half hour to get in for free at five.

I’m afraid I didn’t much like this museum either. It’s the same story as the Museum of Málaga: a beautiful setting – the lovingly restored renaissance palace of the Marquises of Buenavista – and well curated, but a mediocre collection.

Let me digress a moment and talk about me and Pablo and our love-hate relationship. Some of the most memorable and most loved art I’ve seen in the past few years has been by Picasso. All of it was works on paper – aquatints, engravings, linocuts, drawings – most created between the 1950s and the 1970s. I saw it in two exhibits in or near Valencia, both mounted by Bancaja, one of the big Spanish banks that funds a cultural foundation.

When he was confronted with a printer’s plate or a linoleum block or even a square of drawing paper, it seems something switched back on in Pablo. The draftsmanship, composition and artistic planning are all masterful. The subject matter and treatment may be weird or grotesque, but the work always shows his technical and artistic genius.

Picasso linocut print, Bancaja exhibit in Sagunt (near Valencia), 2012

Picasso engraving, Bancaja exhibit in Valencia, 2016

My relationship with the paintings is more on the hate side. Cubism, I find tedious: revolution for revolution’s sake. There is a quote from Picasso in the display materials at this museum that explains something of his philosophy: “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” Fair enough. I understand the sentiment. But in the context, it implies the viewer is the enemy, that the art lover who wants to put paintings and drawings on his apartment walls is the enemy. Why? Yes, idiots who choose paintings to match their drawing room colour scheme are missing the point. But if I find the work actually ugly, as I do much of Picasso’s painting, why would I want it on my walls, or want to look at it ad nauseum in a museum? I don’t.

It’s not just the artistic thinking behind the pictures. We could agree to disagree on that. Picasso was also corrupted by fame, fortune and power. He came to believe his own press that he was the great artistic “genius” of the age, whose every brush stroke or doodle, however slapdash or ill-conceived, was a masterwork, worth any amount of money the gullible were willing to pay. Some of the work on display in this museum is very slapdash and ill-conceived to my eye – and the fawning curatorial commentary does little to persuade me otherwise. When I look at it, I feel insulted. You can create something as wonderful as La Guernica, or the late-career engravings, and you expect me to take this daub seriously? Give me a break.

The museum, to be fair, does not have an abundance of his best paintings. I found a few I could enjoy, but pitifully few. I’m so glad we didn’t pay to get in because I would have been pissed if I’d paid €13.50, or whatever it costs on other days.

End of rant.

Jacqueline seated (1954) - one I actually liked

Yesterday, we did – hmmm. Oh, yeah: nothing. We walked down to the harbour, sat in the sun, read or crossworded, then walked home through the tropical gardens – where things are blooming nicely – and by the Alcazaba and Roman Theatre. (This is a pretty city.) In the evening, we discovered a wonderful new sci-fi series on Netflix, Expanse. Brilliant. Star Wars for adults.